Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 3 Jun 2009 01:28:43 +0200 | From | Ingo Molnar <> | Subject | Merge Xen (the hypervisor) into Linux |
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* Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> Now here's a crazy solution. Merge the Xen hypervisor into Linux > ;-)
That's not that crazy - it's the right technical solution if DOM0 is desired for upstream. From what i've seen in DOM0 land the incestous dependencies are really only long-term manageable if the whole thing is in a single tree.
A lot of Xen legacies could be dropped: the crazy ring1 hack on 32-bit, the various wide interfaces to make pure-software virtualization limp along. All major CPUs shipped with hardware virtualization support in the past 2-3 years, so the availability of VMX and SVM can be taken for granted for such a project.
That cuts down on a fair amount of crap. A lot of code on the Linux side could be reused, and a pure CONFIG_PCI=y (all other things disabled) would provide a "slim hypervisor" instance with a very small and concentrated code base. (That 'slim hypervisor' might even be built with CONFIG_NOMMU.)
That way dom0 would be a natural extension: a minimal interface between Linux-Xen-minimal and the dom0 guest instance.
It's a sane technical model IMO, and makes dom0 a lot more palatable. Having in-tree competition to KVM would also obviously be good to Linux in general.
Ingo
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